Book Review: Arnulf Deppermann and Michael Haugh (eds), Action Ascription in Interaction

(p. 51). (18) As a surname, 纪 is read in the 3rd tone “Jı,̌” not in the 4th tone “Jì” (p. 112). (19) Whenmeaning “astrology,”占 is read in the 1st tone “zhan̄,” not in the 4th tone “zhàn” (p. 97). (20) When meaning “tripe,”肚 is read in the 3rd tone “dŭ,” not in the 4th tone “dù” (p. 112). (21) Some easy words are transcribed or written incorrectly. I believe these are merely typos or editing errors: “tweve” should be “twelve” (p. 7), “Chuánbò 傳播” should be “Chuánbō” (p. 17), “Sǒushén” should be “Sōushén” (p. 20), “Gàn Baǒ” should be “Gan̄ Baǒ” (p. 25), “yánjiù 研究” should be “yánjiū” (p. 25), “xuè 穴” should be “xué” (p. 33), “Lüĺíng 廬陵” should be “Lúlíng” (pp. 48, 79), “Yuánzì 元子” should be “Yuánzı”̌ (p. 49), “Zıw̌éi 紫微” should be “Zıw̌eī” (p. 81), “Shaḡŭ師古” should be “Shıḡŭ” (p. 87), “李太白試” should be “李太白詩” (p. 105), etc.


Discourse Studies 25(1)
Part II, from Chapter 6 to Chapter 11, addresses practices of action ascription. Chapter 6 and 7 focus on two different practices of overt action ascription. In Chapter 6, Arnulf Deppermann and Julia Kaiser reveal how intention ascriptions are used to clarify the ambiguous meaning in the prior turn, coordinate the ascriber's future actions, and index a problem with the preceding utterance. Chapter 7, by Henrike Helmer, delineates how strategy ascription plays a role in a public mediation setting. Three main types of strategy ascriptions are identified, and they all comprise actions themselves which serve to strengthen the speakers' own party and discredit the opponents.
Then, attention is paid to implicit action ascription practices. Chapter 8, by Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen and Sandra A. Thompson, elucidates how the prior turn is ascribed as advice-giving, and how it is responded in terms of its varied deontic stance displayed by different grammatical forms. Chapter 9, by Takeshi Hiramoto and Makoto Hayashi, unveils how the incongruence between one's deontic stance and status, combined with the roles of participants, plays a part in recipients' action ascription in the family decision-making process.
Chapter 10, by Yaxin Wu and Guodong Yu, centers on the secondary action parasitic on action ascription, namely, action assessment. It is demonstrated that particular linguistic forms, like the particle ya in Chinese, may be major resources for action assessment and affect formation. Chapter 11, by Tom Koole and Lotte van Burgsteden, investigates the relation between action ascription and participant identities in emergency calls. The analysis shows that the callers' identities and corresponding actions are not determined by their institutional roles, but ascribed through the interactional contingencies in the call.
Part III reexplores the action ascription on the theoretical dimension. Chapter 12, by N.J. Enfield and Jack Sidnell, challenges the macro categorization of action. They argue that action categorization is neither necessary nor sufficient, since participants are not labeling actions in interaction but dealing with the details of turns under the assumption that the interactors' behavior is goal-directed.
In the last chapter, John Heritage reviews the contributions of previous chapters, and at the same time, provides an overview of researches in action ascription in CA. He also sorts out the resources for action ascription from the bottom-up (turn-internal) and topdown (turn-external) perspectives, while highlighting the goals to be achieved in CA.
This volume can be praised for its systematicity, multi-perspective analysis, and innovative case studies. First, this book presents a systematic introduction to action ascription, from its theoretical development to the latest studies. All the chapters interlock with one another even if they are written by different experts. For instance, the key principle 'action ascription is a social action' claimed in Chapter 1 is integrated into every chapter, and what Chapter 4 discusses about accountability is also underpinned in Chapter 2, 3, and 5.
Second, the analysis in this book is multi-dimensional. It investigates various types of sequence in different environmental contexts like 'everyday advice-giving' (Chapter 8) and 'decision-making while shopping' (Chapter 9), and covers diverse research subjects, such as 'intension' (Chapter 6) and 'strategy' (Chapter 7). The data, including audio and video recordings, come from nine different languages and are analyzed in detail in terms of their linguistic forms or non-linguistic forms (multimodality). Third, this book delves into many topics neglected by previous researchers. For example, Chapter 9 sheds light on the 'roles' relevant to family decision-making, and Chapter 10 conducts research on how affectivity is expressed through the implementation of the secondary actions. Both of them are topics less discussed in CA.
However, since all the chapters in this book are based on qualitative research, its contribution could be even stronger if it includes a quantitative study. Despite this minor flaw, this book, in general, provides invaluable sources for this burgeoning area and offers refreshing views on CA and pragmatics. It could be regarded as a must-read for conversation and pragmatics analysts who are interested in action formation and ascription.

Reviewed by: Keren Zhang, Sichuan International Studies University, China
Translators may make unconscious decisions and their translating process may also be influenced by external factors like discourse that are difficult to gauge. Currently, the focus of discourse-based translation studies is mainly on products like news, machine translations, speeches, etc. There seems a very limited number of works on the process of translating as one of the sub-categories of descriptive translation studies. However, translating is mostly conceptualized as the decision-making that is largely affected by our personal identities shaped and re-shaped in our 'lifestyle politics', a notion indicating our politically, ethically, or morally inspired decisions (p. 1).
Acutely discovering the gap mentioned above, Lifestyle Politics in Translation: The Shaping and Re-shaping of Ideological Discourse provides an original approach to investigating how the translating process shapes our identities. The study takes English and French versions of institutional papers by international organs such as UN, EU, the Council of Europe, and alike as cases to explore the ideological effects that translators introduce to the readers, especially the hegemonic lifestyle pervading the West: the individualism, patriarchy, and so-called 'modern discourses and narratives' from the eurocentered ideological emancipation since the Enlightenment.
The book first proves the fact that lifestyle is constructed discursively by drawing developmental definitions of lifestyle politics by Bennett (2003), Machin and van Leeuwen (2010), and de Moor and Verhaegen (2020). In a capitalist society, lifestyle ideology is the representation of values, tastes, choices, and habits that are embedded in discourse. Post-translation studies take translations as rewritings which therefore carry translators' own ideas into the target culture. As a result, translating has evolved into transforming. In this way, translation studies are theoretically linked to ideas like codiscourse, critical discourse analysis, and discursive memory. The authors thus create a working protocol of four meaning-effects of translation: 'hidden transfer, forced disclosure, visible revelation, and ideological change' by creatively dovetailing the discourse